MarketOwl.AI

My AI Marketing SaaS Has Raised $180K

Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Mikalai Kudlasevich, the CEO and founder of MarketOwl.

MarketOwl is a virtual team of AI marketers for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), specializing in fundraising, scaling sales, and testing market hypotheses.

MarketOwl reduces marketing costs for B2B businesses by 30 times. Our AI lead generation marketer targets leads through LinkedIn and email, providing you with 500 targeted leads monthly. We offer multi-channel communication to increase the likelihood of positive responses, and a hassle-free infrastructure to set up your own mailing system.

Our target audience consists of small businesses with one to five employees. This includes companies currently focused on B2B operations, consulting firms, small outsourcing companies, and startups looking to target other businesses.

Currently, our startup is experiencing significant growth, doubling in size month over month. However, we have only recently completed our first round of investments, which means we started from a low baseline.

How do you come up with the idea for MarketOwl.AI?

I spent 10 years in marketing, with four of those years as a marketing director at various agencies. During this time, I frequently encountered numerous clients –– owners of small and medium-sized businesses –– who could not afford the comprehensive marketing services necessary for survival. I observed many agencies turning away these clients due to their inability to pay for services.

This implementation was a turning point for me. According to the National Federation of Independent Business around 20 million of small businesses in the U.S. are struggling to afford marketing for minimal growth. This problem arises from three main factors: lack of financial resources, lack of time, and lack of expertise to manage marketing independently.

Unfortunately, at least one of these issues is always present. Additionally, about 20% of all small businesses fail within the first year or two, partly because they do not know how to effectively promote the products they aim to bring to market.

MarketOwl’s product concept is not just about incorporating AI marketing into companies strategy; it aims to completely replace traditional marketing with an autonomous AI marketers team. This approach would create a fully functional AI marketing department capable of operating independently in 95% of cases, ensuring lead generation and enhancing brand recognition.

Such a model will assist small businesses, especially startups, in surviving and finding clients. Our experience shows that companies with innovative products find it easier to enter the market using AI marketers, as they achieve lower-cost leads and faster growth.

This is what sets us apart in the market: we conduct an initial analysis of the product and client needs, examine their website, describe the product, and based on this analysis, we develop a marketing strategy that includes three target audience segments. For each segment, MarketOwl identifies 25 parameters, whether B2B or B2C.

Currently, we utilize AI for social media management (SMM) and lead generation. These functions provide basic B2B marketing support and facilitate brand growth through cold outreach. Our overarching goal is to establish a comprehensive AI marketing department that encompasses all necessary activities across social media, online platforms, offline channels and BTL.

How did you build the initial version of MarketOwl.AI?

Inspired by HubSpot, we decided to follow a similar approach: doing everything at once. Initially, our product was designed to create a marketing strategy that included descriptions of market segments, target audiences, and promotion channels. We launched this feature even in the pre-MVP stage but discovered that there wasn’t much demand for it from small businesses, as they often don’t have any marketing plan at all.

We realized that trying to convey the value of a marketing strategy to small businesses was not effective. It was much more efficient to incorporate it into a ready-made product and demonstrate, through specific results, that the strategy is pertinent and functional.

After the initial MVP version, which was never publicly released, we concentrated on developing our first AI Marketer: AI SMM. This tool generated X (former Twitter) posts based on product-focused feeds and automatically published them over the span of a month.

After sharing several updates on Reddit, we noticed a surge in registrations for our whitelist, observed a strong conversion from registration to purchase, and realized that AI Marketer was a highly desired feature. As a result, we started developing a LinkedIn marketer and a lead generation manager.

How did you launch MarketOwl.AI and get initial traction?

We are not the kind of team that polishes a project until it’s perfect. In a challenging investment market, it was essential to show traction and prove that our results were worthy of attention. Therefore, as soon as the first prototype of the AI SMM Marketer was ready, we launched it immediately and started promoting it organically. We gathered user feedback, conducted customer development in the live market, and worked on improvements straight away.

When users interacted with our product, we observed their behavior and thought about the ways to enhance their experience. To create our website, we used HubSpot and its inner builder, which we also used for booking calls. Additionally, we used Clutrm, resulting in a starter pack costing 36 euros per month.

Initially, we chose a more complex path because we did not focus on a specific feature that could solve a particular problem or target a distinct audience segment. However, this approach has protected us from competition. We see that all competitors addressing certain tasks within the broader scope of marketing are at the same stage as we are.

This isn’t just about content quality or response quality but also about the same level of distrust. Currently, according to Gartner’s model, we are at the decline of the first hype cycle. I am hopeful that soon we will see steady growth in more conscious interest in AI Marketers.

One of the lessons we learned is to use HubSpot for website creation instead of Webflow, especially as we are focused on SEO in Google’s organic search. HubSpot provides a range of built-in SEO tools that make it easier to optimize your site effectively without incurring the high costs associated with the add-ons that Webflow requires.

What was the growth strategy for MarketOwl.AI and how did you scale?

First, we implemented the strategy developed by our AI Marketer. I expanded on it further due to my extensive experience in this field. We began with organic and viral outreach on Reddit and X, acquiring our initial customers from these platforms. Once we developed a website capable of hosting numerous pages, we created a fairly significant number of commercial pages that resulted in good conversions from SEO traffic to registrations.

We also experimented with paid traffic on Facebook and Google, primarily to demonstrate a working model to investors for our first round of angel investment. We secured our initial angel investors shortly after launching our first product focused on AI and Twitter, and we closed that round based on the subsequent AI Leadgen Marketer, highlighting performance for both the business and ourselves.

Currently, we use a combination of SEO, cold outreach, branding, and awareness on LinkedIn and other platforms. This approach is effective. It’s worth noting that relying on paid traffic in B2B is not advisable, even if you are creating something innovative, as it can become a prohibitively expensive mistake.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building MarketOwl.AI?

The product has the responsibility of clearly demonstrating and proving to any customer, even those without marketing expertise, that a combination of different marketing activities is exactly what they need.

The future of the product partially depends on us and our growth, as well as on the establishment of marketing and sales processes; it also relies on the venture market. Regarding AI, it’s important not to underestimate user expectations, as many believe that AI will take care of everything, if not all, then a significant portion of their tasks.

Many AI tools currently on the market have disappointed users because they still require an understanding of marketing to work effectively with AI assistants. Therefore, the next stage in industry development will involve AI agents that operate autonomously.

Users will concentrate on setup, adjustments, and achieving results without spending time learning and delving into the process. While assistants represent the next evolution of tools, they still require a time investment.

In my view, a startup's primary task is simply to prove its viability and then address minor issues. If you survive, it means you did something right or, at the very least, got lucky for the most part. From there, the focus shifts to competing for incremental growth by improving various functions.

To effectively navigate the B2B marketing landscape, especially in the current climate, there are several strategies that can significantly enhance your efforts:

Utilizing MarketOwl for your business can be a strategic advantage, particularly since one of our product's objectives is to make business entry safer for entrepreneurs. If you have an ambitious idea but are uncertain of its viability, simply come to MarketOwl, use it to develop a marketing strategy, and utilize the AI agents available to you for the initial months to observe the outcomes. If you haven't yet received any market feedback, lead generation through MarketOwl can offer valuable insights into customer development. You can conduct interviews with potential customers to determine whether they need your service and if they are willing to pay for your solution. This approach allows you to swiftly pivot to another project without making significant errors.
It's important to start selling even when you don't have a product yet because creating an MVP can be done relatively quickly. Your main goal is to determine if anyone is willing to pay for the product you've imagined. Many products exist that people are willing to pay for, especially in the small and medium business sector, but they may never become major successes. That’s perfectly fine; at least you can support yourself with that foundation while working on future projects that could be much more successful.

To better understand how companies are ranked in the market, I suggest reading Good to Great by Jim Collins. The book explains how market leaders allocate their roles according to their position. It emphasizes that startups should not behave like Google, assuming they can afford to take significant risks, particularly in product and marketing decisions.

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